“All right. You answer my question first,” I said, borrowing her tone. “Who do you think might not want you to have that book in your possession?”
“Professor Bartholomew Rossi,” she said, her voice sarcastic, grating. “You’re in history. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”
I sat there dumbfounded. “Professor Rossi? What—what do you mean?”
“I have answered your question,” she said, straightening up and adjusting her jacket and piling her gloves one on the other again, as if finished with a task. I wondered fleetingly if she were enjoying the effect her words had on me, seeing me stammer over them. “Now tell me what you mean by all this drama about danger from a book.”
“Miss Rossi,” I said. “Please. I will tell you. Whatever I can. But please explain to me your relation to Professor Bartholomew Rossi.”
She bent down, opened her book bag, and took out a leather case. “Do you mind if I smoke?” For the second time, I saw in her that masculine ease, which seemed to come over her when she put aside her defensively ladylike gestures. “Would you like one?”
I shook my head; I hated cigarettes, although I would almost have accepted one from that spare, smooth hand. She inhaled without any flourish, smoking dexterously. “I do not know why I am telling a stranger this,” she said reflectively. “I guess the loneliness of this place is affecting me. I have hardly spoken with anyone in two months, except about work. And you do not strike me as a gossiping type, although God knows my department is full of them.” I could hear her accent welling up fully under the words, which she spoke with a soft rancor. “But if you’ll keep your promise . . .” The hard look came over her again; she straightened, cigarette jutting defiantly from one hand. “My relationship to the famous Professor Rossi is very simple. Or it should be. He is my father. He met my mother while he was in Romania looking for Dracula.”
My coffee splashed across the table, over my lap, down the front of my shirt—which hadn’t been perfectly clean, anyway—and spattered her cheek. She wiped it off with one hand, staring at me.
“Good God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I tried to clean up, using both our napkins.
“So this really shocks you,” she said, without moving. “You must know him, then.”
“I do,” I said. “He’s my adviser. But he never told me about Romania, and he—he never told me he had a family.”
“He doesn’t.” The coldness in her voice cut through me. “I have never met him, you see, although I guess it is only a matter of time now.” She leaned back in the little chair and hunched her shoulders, crudely, as if defying me to come closer. “I have seen him once, from a distance, at a lecture—imagine, seeing your father for the first time at a distance like that.”
I had made a soggy heap of napkins and now I pushed everything aside, heap, coffee cup, spoon. “Why?”
“It’s a very odd story,” she said. She looked at me, but not as if she were lost in thought. She seemed instead to be gauging my reactions. “All right. It’s a love ’em and leave ’em story.” This sounded strange in her accent, although I wasn’t moved to smile. “Maybe that’s not so odd. He met my mother in her village, enjoyed her company for a while, and left her after a few weeks with an address in England. After he had gone, my mother discovered she was pregnant, and then her sister, who lived in Hungary, helped her flee to Budapest before I was born.”
“He never told me he’d been to Romania.” I was croaking, not speaking.
“Not surprising.” She smoked bitterly. “My mother wrote him from Hungary, to the address he’d left her, and told him about their baby. He wrote her back saying he had no idea who she was or how she’d found his name, and that he’d never been to Romania. Can you imagine anything so cruel?” Her eyes bored into me, huge and starkly black now.
“What year were you born?” It didn’t occur to me to apologize before asking the lady this question; she was so unlike anyone I’d ever encountered that the usual rules didn’t seem to apply.
“In 1931,” she said flatly. “My mother took me to Romania for a few days once, before I even knew about Dracula, but even then she would not go back to Transylvania.”
“My God.” I whispered it to the Formica tabletop. “My God. I thought he’d told me everything, but he didn’t tell me that.”
“He told you—what?” she asked sharply.
“Why haven’t you met him? Doesn’t he know you’re here?”
She looked at me strangely but answered without demurring. “It’s a game, I guess you could say. Just a fancy of mine.” She paused. “I was not doing so badly in the university in Budapest. In fact, they considered me a genius.” She announced this almost modestly. Her English was phenomenally good, I realized for the first time—supernaturally good. Maybe she was a genius.
“My mother did not finish grade school, if you can believe it, although she got some more education later in life, but I was attending the university by the time I was sixteen. Of course, my mother told me my paternal heritage, and we do know Professor Rossi’s outstanding books even in the murky depths of the East Bloc—Minoan civilization, Mediterranean religious cults, the age of Rembrandt. Because he wrote sympathetically on British socialism, our government allows the distribution of his works. I studied English throughout high school—would you like to know why? So I could read the amazing Dr. Rossi’s work in the original. It wasn’t exactly hard to find out where he was, either, you know; I used to stare at the university name on the jackets of his books and vow to go there one day. I thought things through. I made all the right connections, politically—I started by pretending I wanted to study the glorious labor revolution in England. And when the time came, I had my pick of scholarships. We have been enjoying some freedom in Hungary these days, although everyone wonders how long the Soviets will tolerate that. Speaking of impalers. In any case, I went to London first, for six months, and then got my fellowship to come here, four months ago.”
She blew out a curl of gray smoke, thinking, but her eyes never left mine. It occurred to me that Helen Rossi was likelier to run into persecution by the communist governments she referred to with such cynicism than by Dracula. Perhaps she had actually defected to the West. I made a mental note to ask her about this later. Later? And what had become of her mother? And had she made all of this up, in Hungary, in order to attach herself to the reputation of a famous Western academic?
She was following her own train of thought. “Isn’t it a pretty picture? The long-lost daughter turns out to be a great credit, finds her father, happy reunion.” The bitterness in her smile turned my stomach. “But that is not quite what I had in mind. I have come here to let him hear about me, as if by accident—my publications, my lectures. We will see if he can hide from his past then, ignore me as he ignored my mother. And about this Dracula thing —” She pointed her cigarette at me. “My mother, bless her simple soul for thinking of it, told me something about that.”
“Told you what?” I asked faintly.
“Told me about Rossi’s special research on the subject. I had not known about it, not until last summer, just before I left for London. That is how they met; he was asking around in the village about vampire lore, and she had heard something about local vampires from her father and his cronies—not that a man alone should have been addressing a young girl in public, you understand, in that culture. But I suppose he did not know any better. Historian, you know—not an anthropologist. He was in Romania looking for information on Vlad the Impaler, our own dear Count Dracula. And don’t you think it’s strange”—she leaned forward suddenly, bringing her face closer to mine than it had been yet, but ferociously, not in appeal—“don’t you think it is downright weird that he has not published a thing on the subject? Not one thing, as you surely know. Why? I asked myself. Why should the famous explorer of historical territories—and women, apparently, since who knows how many other genius daughters he has out there—why should he not have published anything out of this very unus
ual research?”
“Why?” I asked, not moving.
“I’ll tell you. Because he is saving it up for a grand finale. It is his secret, his passion. Why else would a scholar remain silent? But he has a surprise coming to him.” Her lovely smile was a grin this time, and I didn’t like it. “You would not believe how much ground I have covered in a year, since I learned about this little interest of his. I have not contacted Professor Rossi, but I have been careful to make my expertise known in my department. What a shame it will be for him when someone else publishes the definitive work on the subject first—someone with his own name, too. It is beautiful. You see, I even took his name, once I arrived here—an academic nom de plume, you might say. Besides, in the East Bloc, we do not like other people stealing our heritage and commenting on it; they usually misunderstand it.”
I must have groaned out loud, because she paused momentarily and frowned at me. “By the end of this summer, I will know more than anyone in the world about the legend of Dracula. You can have your old book, by the way.” She opened the bag again and thumped it horribly, publicly, on the table between us. “I was simply checking something in it yesterday and I did not have time to go home for my own copy. You see, I do not even need it. It is only literature, in any case, and I know the whole damn thing almost by heart.”
My father looked around him like a man in a dream. We’d been standing on the Acropolis in silence for a quarter of an hour now, our feet planted on that crest of ancient civilization. I was awed by the muscular columns above us, and surprised to find that the most distant view on the horizon was of mountains, long dry ridges that hung darkly over the city at this sunset hour. But as we started back down, and he came out of his reverie to ask how I liked the great panorama, it took me a minute to collect my thoughts and answer. I had been thinking about the night before.
I’d gone into his room a little later than usual so that he could look through my algebra homework, and I found him writing, mulling over the day’s paperwork, as he often did in the evening. That night he sat very still with his head bent above the desk, drooping toward some documents, not upright and paging through them with his usual efficiency. I couldn’t tell from the doorway whether he was intently scanning something he’d just written, almost without seeing it, or simply trying not to doze. His form cast a great shadow on the undecorated hotel-room wall, the figure of a man slumped dully over another, darker desk. If I hadn’t known his fatigue, and the familiar shape of his shoulders sloping above the page, I might for a second—not knowing him—have said he was dead.
Chapter 18
Triumphal, clear weather, the days enormous as a mountain sky, followed us with spring into Slovenia. When I asked if we’d have time to see Emona again—I connected it already with an earlier era in my life, one with a different flavor altogether, and with a beginning, and as I’ve said before one tries to revisit such places—my father said hurriedly that we’d be far too busy, staying at a great lake north of Emona for his conference and then rushing back to Amsterdam before I fell behind in school. Which I never did, but the possibility worried my father.
Lake Bled, when we arrived, was no disappointment. It had poured into an alpine valley at the end of one of the Ice Ages and provided early nomads there with a resting place—in thatched houses out on the water. Now it lay like a sapphire in the hands of the Alps, its surface burnished with whitecaps in the late-afternoon breeze. From one steep edge rose a cliff higher than the rest, and on this, one of Slovenia’s great castles roosted, restored by the tourist bureau in unusually good taste. Its crenellations looked down on an island, where a specimen of those modest red-roofed churches of the Austrian type floated like a duck, and boats went out to the island every few hours. The hotel, as usual, was steel and glass, socialist tourism model number five, and we escaped it on the second day for a walk around the lower part of the lake. I told my father I didn’t think I could wait another twenty-four hours without seeing the castle that dominated the distant view at every meal, and he chuckled. “If you must, we’ll go,” he said. The new détente was even more promising than his team had hoped, and some of the lines on his forehead had relaxed since our arrival here.
So on the morning of the third day, leaving a diplomatic rehash of what had been rehashed the day before, we took a little bus around the lake, riding nearly to the level of the castle, and then dismounted to walk to the summit. The castle was made of brown stones like discolored bone, joined neatly together after some long state of dilapidation. When we came through the first passageway to a chamber of state (I suppose it was), I gasped: through a leaded window the surface of the lake shone a thousand feet below, stretching white in the sunlight. The castle seemed to be clinging to the edge of the precipice with only its toes dug in for support. The yellow-and-red church on the island below, the cheerful boat docking just then among tiny beds of red-and-yellow flowers, the great blue sky, had all served centuries of tourists, I thought.
But this castle, with its rocks worn smooth since the twelfth century, its tepees of battle-axes, spears, and hatchets in every corner, threatening to crash down if touched—this was the essence of the lake. Those early lake dwellers, moving skyward from their thatched, flammable huts, had ultimately chosen to perch here with the eagles, ruled over by one feudal lord. Even restored so deftly, the place breathed an ancient life. I turned from the dazzling window to the next room and saw, in a coffin of glass and wood, the skeleton of one small woman, dead long before the advent of Christianity, her bronze cloak ornament resting on her crumbling breastbone, green-bronze rings sliding off the bones of her fingers. When I bent over the case to look down at her, she smiled at me suddenly out of eye-sockets deep as twin pits.
On the castle terrace, tea came in white porcelain pots, an elegant concession to the tourist trade. It was strong and good, and the paper-wrapped cubes of sugar were not stale, for once. My father was clenching his hands together on the iron table; the knuckles showed white. I stared at the lake instead, then poured him another cup. “Thank you,” my father said. There was a distant pain in his eyes. I noticed again how worn and thin he looked these days; should he be seeing a doctor? “Look, darling,” he said, turning away a little so that I could see only his profile against that terrific drop of cliff and sparkling water. He paused. “Would you consider writing them down?”
“The stories?” I asked. My heart contracted, sped up its count in my chest.
“Yes.”
“Why?” I countered finally. It was an adult question, with no hedge of childhood wiles around it. He looked at me, and I thought that behind all their fatigue his eyes were full of goodness and sorrow.
“Because if you don’t, I might have to,” he said. Then he turned to his tea, and I saw that he wouldn’t speak about it again.
That night, in the grim little hotel room next to his, I began to write down everything he had told me. He had always said I had an excellent memory—too good a memory, was the way he sometimes put it.
My father told me at breakfast the next morning that he wanted to sit still for two or three days. It was hard for me to picture him actually sitting still, but I could see dark rings under his eyes and I liked the idea of his having a rest. I couldn’t help feeling that something had happened to him, that he was burdened by some silent new anxiety. But he told me only that he was longing again for the Adriatic beaches. We took an express train south through stations whose names were posted in both Latin and Cyrillic letters, then through stations whose names were posted in Cyrillic only. My father taught me the new alphabet, and I amused myself trying to sound out the station signs, each of which looked to me like code words that could open a secret door.
I explained this to my father and he smiled a little, leaning back in our train compartment with a book propped on his briefcase. His gaze wandered frequently from his work to the window, where we could see young men riding little tractors with plows behind, sometimes a horse pulling a cartload of some
thing, old women in their kitchen gardens bending, scraping, weeding. We were moving south again and the land mellowed to gold and green as we hurried through it, then rose up into rocky gray mountains, then dropped on our left to a shimmering sea. My father sighed deeply, but with satisfaction, not the fatigued little gasp he gave more and more often these days.
In a busy market town we left the train and my father rented a car to drive us along the folded complexities of the coastal road. We both craned to see the water on one side—it stretched to a horizon full of late-afternoon haze—and on the other side the skeletal ruins of Ottoman fortresses that climbed steeply toward the sky. “The Turks held this land for a long, long time,” my father mused. “Their invasions involved all kinds of cruelty, but they ruled rather tolerantly, as empires go, once they’d conquered—and efficiently, too, for hundreds of years. This is pretty barren land, but it gave them control of the sea. They needed these ports and bays.”
The town where we parked was right on the sea; the little harbor there was lined with fishing boats knocking against one another in a translucent surf. My father wanted to stay on a nearby island, and he engaged a boat with a wave to its owner, an old man with a black beret on the back of his head. The air was warm, even this late in the afternoon, and the spray that reached my fingertips was fresh but not cold. I leaned out of the bow, feeling like a figurehead. “Careful,” my father said, gathering the back of my sweater in his hand.
The boatman was steering us close to an island port now, an old village with an elegant stone church. He slung a rope around a stump of pier and offered me one gnarled hand up out of the boat. My father paid him with some of those colorful socialist bills, and he touched his beret. As he was clambering back to his seat, he turned. “Your girl?” he shouted in English. “Daughter?”
“Yes,” my father said, looking surprised.